Had a little epiphany last night that I would like to share in a little strategy session with my fellow Free Market Agnostics: the progressives and social democrats and those in general who don’t hear psycho shrieks every time the name of Marx or words like “socialism” are mentioned. We spend a lot of time focusing on our differences with the true believers (the FreeMarketFundamentalists, neo-liberalism , the basement Overmen spurting their Neo-Nietzscheian nonsense in the name of Rand, etc. (only to find ourselves bogged down in the misdirects that the true believers use to divert us from the ultimate a-rational self indulgence that they are working from: white heterosexual male privilege which usually turns into the picked on (by so the so-called Hollywood liberal elite (white heterosexual male burden that they turn to when alone or among themselves. And this notion of being picked on is all over FOX News such as the notion that the rich are being picked on when all they are trying to do is make a buck. I would propose that if we actually look at our common ground, self interest (that is as compared to self indulgence, we may actually be able to lay claim to (outright takeover (two of the cornerstones of the true believer’s argument and put some shine on how tainted by self indulgence and insincere their arguments actually are. In other words, I’m talking about a way to shit in their face with their own nonsense.
I would start with this erroneous notion that that the true believers have some kind exclusive monopoly on the notion of achievement. If we were to ask ourselves how it is the true believers actually see Marx as an actual human who played a role in our history, we might jump to the conclusion of some bearded beast with red glowing eyes and horns sticking out of his scraggly long hair. And as much as I would like to believe that, my educated guess is that they don’t think about it all because most of them know very little about Marx. What they are mainly focused on are his ideologies which present a threat to their self indulgent life styles. But if there ever was a legitimate description of Marx (and I am quite confident in this: Marx was a guy who found what he loved to do and loved it so much that he wanted to create a system in which everyone could find and pursue what they loved: self actualization as Maslow later called it. In other words, Marx was a guy who had a full appreciation of achievement.
The problem with the true believer’s embrace and vision of achievement is that, in reality, it conditions achievement on a lot of contingencies based on mythologies about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. It is quick to point out the success stories of people like Whoopie Goldberg or Rappers; but what it fails to recognize is that for every Whoopie Goldberg or Jay-Z, there are thousands of others out there trying to do the same thing only to fail miserably. This obliviousness is what translates into the erroneous notion that if we stop sharing the burden of the less fortunate among us, that burden will somehow disappear. But the only real result of that is that the burden simply becomes localized either through crime or the desperate turning to those close to them who have resources thereby compromising the ability of those who would prefer to actually achieve.
But, of course, due to the theoretical laziness and denial involved in the true believer, this point would be hard to get across. It would be equally hard to get through their individualistic fancy based on Atlas Shrugged that our advancement as a species is now more dependent on the communal model provided by computer programmers in which individuals freely bounce off of one another. In other words, the days of the lone genius are over. Now, in order to get beyond ourselves, we have to create a kind communal momentum that can no longer be restricted by the criteria of profit seeking behaviors. One only need look at the movement of cable TV to see this in which reality TV becomes prevalent because it is cheap to produce while bringing in the same ad revenue. And so much for the notion that only the market can lead to quality; I mean given that quality programming still manages to happen through such enterprises as PRI or the BBC.
The point is that if achievement (even excellence (is what we are after, it is not the true believers that have the answer but the market agnostics. It is us who want to set up systems that will address the needs of the desperate among us so that we are free to achieve. And this addresses yet another mythology that the true believers tend to embrace: this pastoral vision of everyone doing what they do best and exchanging it for what other people do best. This might have been something more than a myth back in the days that Adam Smith wrote about it. But it does little in the days of mass population and the mass production it takes to supply it.
But let the true believers appeal to it all they want. It is only the agnostics that can fulfill it. By creating a society in which the needs of the desperate among us are addressed, by providing, for instance, assistance to a family that is dealing with a handicap child, or assistance to our elderly, or social workers that deal with the problems of the poor, we distribute the burden in such a way that everyone has the time to pursue self actualization (excellence (achievement. And that is while allowing everyone to do what they do best while leaving them, in turn, time for self actualization.